Contents

Desktop

It didn’t happen overnight, but Steam’s catalogue of Linux games has grown significantly over the last few years, no doubt helped by the release Value’s Debian-powered SteamOS. Abandoning Windows for the open source platform was once the quickest way to gaming frustration, be it a lack of native ports or wrestling with the likes of Wine or other virtualisation option, but with almost 700 working titles available, the variety is certainly there.

Server

Lately I’ve been causing a ruckus among readers who appear to have a very narrow view of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. My main point has been that we need a streamlined, finely tailored Linux server distro that better supports what server instances are becoming: transient, highly specialized bundles of processes and services. At some point, beyond Linux containers and cloud-scale server instances, we hit on the concept of server as process.

ARM and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced a new multi-year agreement that will deliver ARMv8-A processor IP optimized for TSMC 10nm FinFET process technology. Because of the success in scaling from 20nm SoC to 16nm FinFET, ARM and TSMC have decided to collaborate again for 10FinFET. This early pathfinding work will provide valuable learning to enable physical design IP and methodologies in support of customers to tape-out 10nm FinFET designs as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.

It gets even better. ARM and its “partners” are drawing a bead on 10nm which will make ARMed processors even less expensive to produce/operate. This will allow even more processors to be sold for tiny gadgets, mobile gadgets, personal computers and yes, servers and HPC. Of course Intel can do this too, reclaiming some performance leads but Intel will have to go head to head on price/performance, the antithesis of monopoly.

Other updates that are included with the release include support for the Radeon R9 290 GPU family in the open-source AMD Linux driver. In addition, the open-source NVIDIA driver has received several improvements.

After a calm week when Linux 3.17 was extended by one week, Linus Torvalds happily released the Linux 3.17 kernel a few minutes ago. Linux 3.17 is out in all of its glory and due to Torvalds’ travel schedule the Linux 3.18 merge window will be open for about three weeks.

Graphics Stack

In addition to doing the xf86-video-freedreno 1.3.0 release this weekend, Rob Clark also took the opportunity to write a lengthy blog post on the progress made for the open-source, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver stack for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware. The few contributors involved have done a stunning job over the past few months to implement much of OpenGL 3 for this ARM graphics driver and make other improvements — all without the support or backing of Qualcomm.

A number of people have recently asked what is new with freedreno. It had been a while since posting an update.. and, well, not everyone watches mesa commit logs for fun, or watches #freedreno on freenode, so it seemed like time for another semi-irregular freedreno blog post.

Last week having done the GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with a ton of OpenGL benchmarks followed by GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks and yesterday even running some updated NVIDIA VDPAU Linux benchmarks, next up for this high-end Maxwell graphics processor are some 2D performance benchmarks using NVIDIA’s binary blob.

Now having done the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with plenty of OpenGL benchmarks and yesterday running a bunch of GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks, for your Sunday morning viewing are now some Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) results for a range of NVIDIA GPUs.

Applications

A subtitle editor is a type of computer software that lets users create and edit subtitles. These subtitles are superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Subtitles can literally make the difference between being immersed in a movie or only watching the screen, trying to keep up with developments. Good subtitling does not distract but actually enhances viewing pleasure, and even native speakers can find subtitles useful, not only where the individual is hearing-impaired.

QupZilla is a relatively new WebKit-based web browser written in Qt, which makes it perfect for KDE users. QupZilla looks just great, and it seems to be a perfect browser for those users who prefer a more different approach when it comes to the interface look and feel. QupZilla stands out with an interface that doesn’t resemble neither of the ‘modern’ ones like Firefox, Chrome or Opera, but rather keeps a classic look, which I believe may fit many users out there. So let’s see what this impressive browser is all about.

The latest stable stable release for XBMC is 13.2 and this is the final branch of the application with that name. The developers have been working for quite some time on the replacement, and, from the looks of it, they are getting closer with each new version.

Proprietary

Ubuntu Touch is stable enough for daily usage, but it also requires apps. While it has not been officially confirmed yet, but it looks like the Netflix developers are already working at a native Netflix client for Ubuntu Touch.

Here is a look back at the last week on GamingOnLinux, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past week for Linux Gaming! Sorted from lowest to highest to make sure you don’t miss the smaller news stories. There’s just so much news now that things like this are needed for people not to get swallowed up in a sea of Linux games. Think of it like reading a handy Linux gaming magazine of the last weeks news all in one handy place! We don’t include todays stories as that only requires you to look down a little on the home page. Also if you wish to keep track of these overview posts you can with our Overview RSS.

This 32nd alpha release to the Unvanquished game brings a new SMG model for its rifle replacement, animation/texture fixes and updates, various bug fixes, and more rendering work. The latest renderer work to its “Daemon” engine include fixes, optimizations, and other improvements. However, compared to some of the earlier Unvanquished Alpha releases that brought major engine changes, new maps, and gameplay improvements, there aren’t too many exciting updates to share this month…

The game has now seen the official release, and it looks pretty wild. One thing to note is that apparently pulseaudio causes a slight audio delay in Reckpunk, so if you check it out then disable pulseaudio for it for an optimal experience. I can’t say with pulseaudio I noticed any delay myself, so maybe it’s not always an issue. At least ir runs for me now though, as when we covered it before it wouldn’t even run.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Eric is a Python integrated development environment with rich features, coming in two variants: Eric4, which will use Python 2, and Eric5, using Python 3. Eric is written in Qt and thus fits well in a KDE environment.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Is there still a future for GNOME 3, the open source Linux desktop that was once massively popular, yet in recent years has seen its preponderance wane in favor of alternatives such as Xfce and Canonical’s Unity? Recent indicators say yes.

Full disclosure: I should was an avid GNOME user in the days of GNOME 2, the dead-simple yet elegant desktop environment that powered many Linux desktops for the better part of a decade. But when the GNOME developers switched their focus to the next generation of the platform, GNOME 3, circa 2011, I jumped ship, mostly because I couldn’t make sense of GNOME Shell, the developers’ attempt to discard everything users have learned to expect from the desktop-computer experience over the last 30 years and impose a radically new metaphor of user interaction in its place.

OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run the XBMC media player solution and to work on virtually any kind of device out there. This is just an update, but it’s still quite an interesting read.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the availability of the newest major release of Red Hat Storage Server, a leading open software-defined storage solution for scale-out file storage. The advanced capabilities in Red Hat Storage 3 are well-suited for data-intensive enterprise workloads including big data, operational analytics and enterprise file sharing and collaboration. With its proven and validated workload solutions, Red Hat Storage Server 3 enables enterprises to curate enterprise data to increase responsiveness, control costs and improve operational efficiency.

Heiko Rupp, a contributor to Opensource.com and Principal Software Engineer and Project Lead for the RHQ project at Red Hat, shares with us in this Community Spotlight the hardware he wishes were more open in his life. Heiko also gives a glimpse into his day-to-day on the RHQ-Project, an enterprise management solution for JBoss middleware projects and other server-side applications.

Fedora

Josef Bacik commented this Sunday morning, “My plan is to push for F23, I’m still wrapping up some balance bugs and some other issues we’ve found at work and then this will be my next priority. Suse benefits from having a narrow ‘supported’ criteria, like only use it with lots of space and don’t use any of the RAID stuff, plus they have two kernel guys on it and Dave Sterba who is now in charge of btrfs-progs. Fedora unfortunately has me who has Facebook work to do and Eric [Sandeen] who is a professional [file-system] juggler. We will get there, and when we do it will be less painful than its going to be for Suse since they will have fixed it all for us.”

Debian Family

The Debian Installer Team has announced that Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is out and ready for download. This latest version brings some very interesting changes for Jessie and a ton of improvements.

The Debian installer is always launched first, so if you want to test the latest Debian 8 version, you will have to install it. There is no Live CD, which means that you will need to have a lot of patience. From what we’ve seen so far, Debian Jessie Beta 2 was worth the wait.

Significant about the Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is that it defaults again to using the GNOME desktop environment over Xfce and there’s currently initial support for the ARM64 and PowerPC64el architectures with the Debian installer. This Jessie beta 2 update also has console setup changes, hardware detection improvements, and a number of other changes.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

The first thing you need to know is that Ubuntu 14.10 is almost exactly like 14.04. There are virtually no visible meaningful differences as far as I can tell. So if you are using Ubuntu and are sticking with Ubuntu, don’t expect pretty fireworks. This will not be an exciting upgrade.

Meizu’s MX4 flagship has been launched at the beginning of last month and the device is selling like hotcakes. People around the world have ordered (and many of them already received) Meizu’s flagship. It seems like Meizu will soon get an interesting software offering. Meizu, Bq and Canonical announced their partnership a while ago and it was just a matter of time before we see Ubuntu on Meizu, that’s at least what everyone was guessing at the time.

UbuTricks is a Zenity-based, graphical script with a simple interface. Although early in development, its aim is to create a simple, graphical way of installing updated applications in Ubuntu 14.04 and future releases.

While the first Ubuntu Touch RTM (release to manufacturing) image has been made available a few weeks ago, the Ubuntu Touch RTM #3 image has been recently released, bringing better user feedback for secure connections has been implemented, the developer mode has been enhanced, and fixes for the dialer, messaging, address-book, the ofono packages have been added and the Mir display server and QtMir packages have been updated.

hile Canonical is focusing a lot on developing Ubuntu Touch and taking the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Mobile systems closer to convergence, the Ubuntu Mate version may convince many users to switch to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Mate 14.10 will be using MATE 1.8.1 as default and will contain some special optimizations for Ubuntu, optimizations that are not available if you only install the classical Mate version on Ubuntu.

Open source projects live and die by their communities. Cultivating that core group of developers, administrators, users and other contributors who work together to improve the code base is no easy task, even for experienced community managers. There are some tried-and-true methods to follow, however, pioneered by some of the best open source communities around.

Flavours and Variants

Most of the Linux operating systems usually choose a specific design for the login window and stick with it. Developers rarely let users choose details about the login window, and at most they only allow them to modify the background.

German developers have this week launched a new mini PC called the Pi Vessel, which as the name suggests is based on the Raspberry Pi platform and comes supplied running a version of the versatile Linux operating system.

The Pi Vessel has been created to provide a complete mini PC package and offers a fully enclosed Pi minicomputer using the Raspberry Pi a model B+ computer encased in an aluminium outer casing.

Phones

Firefox OS was developed by Mozilla and it made its appearance in 2012, but it was released one year later for smartphones and tablets, following to be used on smart TVs as well. It was built on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, which means that the websites are treated as applications and the HTML5 apps are communicating with the phone’s hardware through Web APIs. This makes it unique, but it’s not just a browser that runs on a Linux-based OS. Even the camera or the dialer are considered applications, and every website that is ran in the form of an app is accessed through Gecko engine. For now, the devices that can support Fire OS are Keon and Peak by Geeksphone.

Android

So in an attempt to stem the flow of phone manufactures using the free version of Android, Google have developed Android One, which is essentially a premium version of Android which Google itself will run and maintain. It is essentially a light weight version of the original with less customization options which manufactures will be able to install and forget about because Google will take care of the maintenance.

SureMote controls appliances through the infrared blaster on newer Android phones (there’s no iOS version yet, so iPhone fans need to hold on to their Blu-Ray clickers for now). It was developed by Israeli company Tekoia and already has thousands of devices connected. It’s a strong start, though the app will need to continue growing its list of compatible devices to be a true approximation of a universal remote.

Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it’s also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn’t seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.

I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.

I was working on another human-centered file system feature, union mounts, when I heard that a friend of mine had been groped at an open source conference for the third time in one year. While I loved my file systems work, I felt like stopping sexual harassment and assault of women in open source was more urgent, and that I was uniquely qualified to work on it. (I myself had been groped by another Linux storage developer.) So I quit my job as a Linux kernel developer and co-founded the Ada Initiative, whose mission is supporting women in open technology and culture. Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault.

Nine years ago, Sam Altman was a Stanford University computer science student. And then he dropped out to start a startup.

This year, he’s returned to campus — not to finish his degree, but to teach a class called “How to Start a Startup.”

Altman, whose mobile location startup Loopt eventually sold for a cool $43.4 million, is now 29 years old and the president of Y Combinator, an accelerator that provides seed funding and guidance to fledgling startups. He launched the class to make the wealth of knowledge Y Combinator gives to a select group of startups more publicly available — not only by giving it to a class of 300 Stanford students but to everyone.

I was introduced to open source nearly 15 years ago by a friend when I asked him what that foot thing was bouncing around on his screen saver. He then explained what GNOME was and what open source software was. I was hooked immediately; the philosophy and methodology made perfect sense to me. It took awhile for it to become the focus of my career, but it’s been an incredibly rewarding path.

Sayan Chowdhury couldn’t believe his name would be etched on the wall of fame along with other Mozillians. The Mozilla Monument outside the company’s office in San Francisco recognizes contributors who’ve helped the maker of the Firefox browser and other products keep the internet alive, open and accessible. Chowdhury is one among the 5,000-odd Mozilla volunteers doing his bit for the love of code.

Databases

CMS

In 2001, Moodle was launched as an online solution for educators to freely adopt as a tool to reach and engage students in the learning experience within their own websites. Today, Moodle’s design and evolution continues to achieve this goal as a free and open source learning platform with clear pedagogical principles, adopted by over 50 million users in pretty much every country that has computers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Manuel explained, “GCC diagnostics have steadily improved in recent releases. In addition to the myriad of bugs fixed per release, every release had at least one major improvement in diagnostics. Unfortunately, the number of people contributing to this effort is very limited and we are more and more busy with other obligations. We need new blood and we need help. It has never been easier to contribute to GCC than nowadays. There are many ways you can help and there are tasks for every level of skill and time commitment.”

Public Services/Government

Germany might become an example for other cities that are looking to shed their dependency on proprietary solutions, such as Windows. After Munich, which has already made the move to Linux, Hamburg could be the next big city in Germany to do the same thing.

Open Data

The Moabi project is reusing the tools of the OpenStreetMap project to map natural resource use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is an example of what Mikel Maron (from the Moabi project) and Elizabeth McCartney (from the US Geological Survey) called ‘OpenStreetMap as Infrastructure’ in their recent talk at State of the Map US. ie taking the OpenStreetMap tool-chain and applying them to new problems.

Programming

We’ve covered Capstone in the past as a disassembly framework built atop LLVM. Capstone supports multiple platforms and architectures with an intent to be used for security purposes and binary analysis.

Obviously Apple is very keen to only supply review units and grant event accreditation only to medias that are guaranteed to heap praise on its products and wouldn’t bother investigating any potential issues with it.

Health/Drug War

A review of Eula Biss’s ‘On Immunity,’ which tackles the history of anti-vaccination movements

[...]

That crackpot theory turned out to have credence. “In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign . . . to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location.” (The attempt failed.) The politics of immunization, it’s clear, are complex.

Efforts by the government to provide vaccines were badly undermined after it was revealed that the CIA used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, offering a program of hepatitis vaccinations in the north-western city of Abbottabad as a front to obtain DNA samples from children at a local compound where Osama bin Laden lived.

However, efforts to eradicate it are hampered by the Taliban, which have banned immunizations and attacked polio vaccination teams across Pakistan. Militants stepped up attacks on polio workers after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, offered a program of hepatitis vaccinations in the northwestern city of Abbottabad as a for his CIA-backed effort to obtain DNA samples from children at a local compound where Osama bin Laden live. The al-Qaida leader was later killed during a 2011 raid there by U.S. Navy SEALs.

And yet even for the president, this latest yelping and yowling is unseemly. Mr Karzai and his late brother — formerly Kandahar’s most eligible drug peddler — were largely sustained by piles of CIA ‘black cash’, a cute expression the Western press trotted out last year.

The movie follows Webb as he stumbles onto a story, which leads to the shady origins of the men who started the crack epidemic on the nation’s streets… and further alleges that the CIA was aware of major dealers who were smuggling cocaine into the U.S., and using the profits to arm rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

Based upon the books “Dark Alliance,” by former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, and “Kill the Messenger,” by Nick Schou, the film chronicles Webb’s pursuit of a very complicated story involving the CIA, guns, and the crack epidemic. After writing a controversial article that alleged the CIA was aware of drug dealers smuggling cocaine into the United States and using the profits to arm rebels fighting in Nicaragua, Webb’s life was turned upside down amid accusations of inaccuracy, and the reporter became the story.

Since the Contra-cocaine scandal surfaced in 1985, major U.S. news outlets have disparaged it, most notably when the big newspapers destroyed Gary Webb for reviving it in 1996. But a New York Times review of a movie on Webb finally admits the reality, writes Robert Parry.

Still eager to break into the lucrative, real-life espionage miniseries game—despite the ratings failure of previous effort The Assets—ABC is producing another miniseries about the history of spying. This time, the network is sweetening the deal by choosing a subject rife with easily marketable stuff like drugs, torture, and mind control: the CIA’s Project MKUltra. Titled MKUltra, the miniseries will explore the agency’s infamous mind control project, which ran for much of the Cold War and was focused on using brainwashing, LSD, and physical and psychological abuse to forcibly take control of the human mind. Of course, MKUltra was only the last in a long string of names that government agents gave their often-bizarre efforts; in a different (and, we’d argue, better) world where they’d been less fickle, we could be talking about a series named ARTICHOKE.

Security

A recently-declassified CIA document analyzing the founding of America determined that Benjamin Franklin — yes, that one — had been such a massive security risk that it was a miracle that he didn’t screw up the entire American Revolution.

The article, which ran in the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, focused on Franklin’s time in France as part of the three-man American Commission, and found that the diplomatic group — key to coordinating France’s crucial assistance to American forces — had been “penetrated” by multiple British spies.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

The vast majority of Americans—some 72 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in late September—say they believe that the United States will end up using ground troops to combat ISIS in Iraq.

In other words, they don’t believe the multiple explicit promises that President Obama has made to the contrary since he first announced the start of this conflict in August.

US intelligence services seem to have a knack for seeing what isn’t there – Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and endless communist plots in an earlier era – while missing what is. The CIA famously failed to spot the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union but it has also missed the pretty conspicuous warning signs of looming catastrophes where benign American action could have saved a lot of lives, such as the genocide in Rwanda two decades ago.

It should be obvious by now that if such bombing campaigns have an effect, it is to make things much worse. What western leaders portray as valiant efforts to rid the world of evil forces such as ISIL just don’t play the same way in the region. In Iraq, for instance, western military intervention is viewed as support for the authoritarian, sectarian and West-approved leadership, whose persecution and air strikes are so bad that many Sunnis are prepared to put up with ISIL, for now, as preferable.

Indeed, going further back in history, the United States grew from 13 former colonies into a vast nation based on the European model of colonial conquest: Wage brutal war on the indigenous population with the goal of annihilation.

The nation that prides itself on declaring its independence from a colonial empire actually adapted the colonial model of expansion, both domestically and as an international military interventionist.

Conservative media is dubiously claiming that the rise of the Islamic State is due in part to President Obama skipping scheduled daily intelligence briefings. The basis of this claim is a misleading interpretation of how intelligence briefings are received by the White House that was debunked two years ago.

The purpose of the US campaign against the Islamic State is to provide grounds for the trillion dollar annual military budget Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, told RT.

This fascinating new study shows how the CIA and the British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II.

Israeli intelligence has given up to modern trends and introduced an online questionnaire for would-be spies. Unlike the businesslike CIA or MI5 web draft campaigns, Israelis are luring volunteers with mystery halo always shrouding Mossad’s activities.

When the CIA’s ex-Cairo station chief Miles Copeland penned his book ‘The Game of Nations’ in 1969, readers were shocked to discover the huge resources spent by Washington stage-managing the post-war politics of the Middle East and Egypt in particular.

This could get awkward. A new film, “Colonia,” starring Emma Watson (@emwatson) and Daniel Bruhl, depicts events that transpired during the 1973 Chilean military coup. Will it touch on things the United States might or might not have done during that time frame?

The United States, in 2000, admitted to some indirect involvement in the coup, which led to the ascension of dictator Augusto Pinochet. But the CIA has not gone so far as saying it was involved directly. That led to a peculiar exchange when President Obama went to Chile in 2009.

The documentary is called “USA Invasion: History of American Intervention in Bolivia”, covering the relationship between North America and Bolivia from 1920 until recent times.

A documentary series that implicated Bolivian opposition candidates with United States agencies and neoliberal policies will be released on Friday, which is less than two weeks before the general elections.

Cuban national hero José Martí referred to land lying between the Rio Grande River and the Straits of Magellan as “Our America.” In an essay with that title published in 1892, Martí evoked the Rio Grande boundary as a divide between peoples with their own history, culture and future and an industrializing, crass civilization to the north promising no good.

Indeed, U.S. agents or proxies would soon be sewing grief and despair. Early in the 20th century they launched military incursions. Subsequently less blatant interventions left terror in their wake. Anniversaries in September and October – a season of sorrow in Our America – recall murder and mayhem. One asks: Can international solidarity prevent victims? Who in North America, epicenter of terrorist plotting, will take on that job?

The committee was formed in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal and subsequent revelations about CIA activities, including information about the agency’s anti-Castro efforts not divulged to the Warren Commission.

Its conclusion was stunning, though tempered by its choice of language: Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”, but investigators were unable to identify a second gunman or the extent of the conspiracy. The committee ruled out the Cuban and Soviet governments, as well as the Secret Service, FBI and CIA; it didn’t rule out the possible involvement of individual members of organised crime or anti-Castro Cuban groups.

A former Cuban exile anti-Castro militant told a conference audience Sept. 26 in a blockbuster revelation that he saw accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with their mutual CIA handler six weeks before the killing and there would have been no anti-Castro movement in Cuba without the CIA funding.

US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew up plans to “smash Cuba” with air strikes nearly 40 years ago, government papers obtained by researchers show. He was angered by Cuba’s 1976 military intervention in Angola and was considering retaliation if Cuban forces were deployed elsewhere in Africa.

Except it wasn’t just Cuba that was intervening in Angola. China, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were messing about. Zaire (as the Democratic Republic of Congo was called under the terrible, autocratic reign of Mobutu Sese Seko) was trying to steal the oil province of Cabinda from Angola. And South Africa had invaded, worried that a leftie Angola might undermine apartheid and give upstart Namibians unwelcome notions about independence.

In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba.

In the new book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” authors Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande use recently declassified documents to expose the secret history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba. Among the revelations are details of how then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger considered launching airstrikes against Cuba after Fidel Castro sent troops to support independence fighters in Angola in 1976. In the years that followed, top-secret U.S. emissaries, including former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, worked to normalize relations with Cuba. The book’s release comes as Cuban leader Raúl Castro is set to participate for the first time in next year’s Summit of the Americas in Panama. Cuba recently denounced the Obama administration for extending the more than 50-year embargo for another year in a little-noticed move in September.

Pierson’s undoing was not telling the president about a Sept. 16 incident in Atlanta in which President Barack Obama rode an elevator with an armed security contractor during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two White House officials said. The armed contractor’s proximity to Obama violated the agency’s security protocols.

Usually, Washington starts scapegoating its spies after its wars have failed to achieve their objectives – as happened in Iraq, when the natives failed to greet the American invaders with bottomless gratitude, and in Vietnam, where the awesome U.S. war machine slaughtered three million people but still could not subdue a Third World country’s quest for independence.

But President Obama has essentially inaugurated his bombing campaign in Syria with an admission of past “mistakes,” telling 60 Minutes that the CIA “underestimated” the strength of ISIS. What Obama’s admission actually shows is that the real U.S. mission in Syria – the three-year proxy war to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad – is already a failure.

As far as the public knows, there is no money attached to the bill. The Saudi government has already volunteered to train and contribute funds to approved Syrian rebel groups. According to an expert from Foreign Policy Magazine, the CIA has already been training Syrian fighters at a base in Jordan for a long time. Understandably, the efforts have not started to pay off yet. Obviously there is a broad range of people fighting against the regime in Damascus. One of them has gained strength more rapidly than the others – ISIS. Well, who are these militants? Where do they come from? According to the BBC, the group was first established in Iraq as a derivation of al-Qaida in Iraq.

America’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, Barack Obama, who helped turn Libya into a failed state by toppling ruler Moammar Gadhafi, has started a new war in Syria and Iraq even as the U.S. remains embroiled in the Afghanistan war. Obama’s air war in Syria — his presidency’s seventh military campaign in a Muslim nation and the one likely to consume his remaining term in office — raises troubling questions about its objectives and his own adherence to the rule of law.

Afghanistan has inaugurated its first new president in a decade, swearing in Ashraf Ghani to head a power-sharing government. Joining him on stage Monday was Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s new vice president. Dostum is one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, once described by Ghani himself as a “known killer.” Dostum’s rise to the vice presidency comes despite his involvement in a 2001 massacre that killed up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war. The victims were allegedly shot to death or suffocated in sealed metal truck containers after they surrendered to Dostum and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. The dead prisoners — some of whom had been tortured — were then buried in the northern Afghan desert. Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll, has been widely accused of orchestrating the massacre and tampering with evidence of the mass killing. For more than a decade, human rights groups have called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into the massacre including the role of U.S. special forces and CIA operatives. We speak to Jamie Doran, director of the 2002 documentary “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” and Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy at Physicians for Human Rights, the group that discovered the site of the mass graves of the Taliban POWs.

As the U.S. expands military operations in Syria, we look at the Khorasan group, the shadowy militant organization the Obama administration has invoked to help justify the strikes. One month ago, no one had heard of Khorasan, but now U.S. officials say it poses an imminent threat to the United States. As the strikes on Syria began, U.S. officials said Khorasan was “nearing the execution phase” of an attack on the United States or Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up a commercial plane in flight. We are joined by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, whose new article with Glenn Greenwald is “The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria.”

The ranks of the Islamic State jihadists are already full of “moderate rebels” previously trained, equipped and funded by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA. So much for the State Department and CIA’s vetting process, particularly when these militias have shown a capability to shift allegiances on a daily, if not more frequent, basis. The fact of the matter is that the main beneficiaries of our attacks on the Islamic State will be the Iranian proxies in Damascus and Baghdad.

A few months ago, a former top CIA operative applied for a Lebanese visa to do some work in Beirut for an oil company. While he was waiting for approval, a package arrived at his client’s office. Inside was a full dossier on his CIA career. “It included things on where I had served, well back into 1990s,” said Charles Faddis, who ran the CIA’s covert action program in Kurdistan during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other top assignments. “It had details on my travels to Israel and Lebanon—years ago.”

What the U.S. government doesn’t want the world to focus on is the fact that the CIA was very active in supplying Libyan rebels with support to take down Gaddafi. Unfortunately, in an effort to take out one enemy of freedom, the CIA got in bed with another — many of the Libyan rebels included Al-Qaeda backed jihadists who were also Al-Qaeda in Iraq. (1)

For several years, Official Washington blinded itself to the growing radicalism of the Syrian opposition, all the better to portray the Assad regime as the “bad guys” and the rebels as the “good guys.” Now, everyone is pointing fingers about the ISIS “surprise,” as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

For the past three years, Official Washington has viewed the Syrian civil war as “white-hatted” rebels against “black-hatted” President Assad, but finally some of the “gray-hatted” reality is breaking through, though perhaps too late, Robert Parry reports.

Famed public intellectual Cornel West, whose new book Black Prophetic Fire is a re-examination of key black political figures through a different lens, was initially a big supporter of Barack Obama and appeared with him during his first presidential campaign. But in 2012, West says he didn’t even vote. “I couldn’t vote for a war criminal,” he said, calling Obama’s administration a “drone presidency.”

Cornel West has been one of President Obama‘s biggest liberal critics, both on race and foreign policy, and in a new video for TIME, West says that Obama has a very “paternalistic” way of speaking when he addresses young black men.

Cornel West — acclaimed thinker and activist — sat down to talk with Belinda Luscombe about his new book, Black Prophetic Fire. The book, which he wrote with Christa Buschendorf, looks at the work of six leaders from African-American history. But, as is pointed out in the video above, those six leaders aren’t all equally well known: the book moves from the most famous Civil Rights names, W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King, Jr., to a name that may be unfamiliar to those not versed in the subject.

Fred Branfman, the first person to draw public attention to a previously unknown U.S. bombing campaign inside Laos during the Vietnam War and who later became a leading antiwar activist in Washington, died Sept. 24 at a medical facility in Budapest, where he had lived for several years. He was 72.

Many rumors are circulating in Amman about alleged terror threats to shopping malls and other public places in response to news that the kingdom’s air force has joined the US-led coalition in targeting Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria.

While US President Barack Obama has said his country’s intelligence services underestimated the strength of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Saudi Interior Minister Prince Muhammad Bin Naif said: “We know that ISIS was not randomly formed but rather sponsored by states and organizations that employ all their resources and ill intentions in backing ISIS.” How can we interpret this?

Late in the 20th century, state terror was a routine instrument of policy, both domestically and internationally. The Phoenix Program in South Vietnam was a CIA-sponsored assassination campaign against suspected Communist leaders on the village level. Chile’s dictator Pinochet waged state terror against leftists and even blew up a Chilean exile in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan funded the Nicaraguan contras, who murdered schoolteachers, while the CIA laid mines in Nicaraguan harbours. South Africa’s apartheid regime carried out state terror against African National Congress members both domestically and in other African countries.

Next April will be the 40th anniversary of the operation. Watching the film made me think again of the all the follow-on effects and long-term consequences of any war. It made me think also of the refugees who came to the U.S. and of their accomplishments. In 2009, Commander Hung B. Le, son of a Vietnamese navy officer and rescued by the USS Barbour County (LST-1195) at sea after the air evacuation ended, commanded the USS Lassen (DDG-82) as she sailed into Da Nang. Maj. Bung Lee and his family, now retired Rear Admiral Chambers and Commander Vern Jumper, the USS Midway’s Air Boss who managed the flight deck that hectic day, attended the 35th anniversary celebration held on the Midway, now a museum in San Diego. Recently, Brigadier General Viet Luong, whose family left Vietnam in the “black operation” the day before the official evacuation, became the U.S. Army’s first Vietnamese general officer.

US Vice President Joe Biden apologized Saturday to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was angry over comments in which Biden said Erdogan had admitted that Turkey had made mistakes by allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria.

When Joe Biden gets candid, he really lets rip. The US vice president, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on Thursday told his audience – point blank – that America’s Sunni allies are responsible for funding and arming Al Qaeda-type extremists in Syria.

A Nobel Peace Prize observer with a relatively unsuccessful betting record speculates that the Japanese people who uphold war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution are most likely to be chosen the winner of this year’s award, which is to be announced this week.

Transparency Reporting

In a trailer advertising WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s new book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, the never-before-seen clip (below) shows WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison phoning the State Department’s front desk and asking to speak with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It’s an emergency,” Assange prompts Harrison to say, passing a notecard across the table.

The Dissenter [reposted from here, “Inspector General Claims to Have Found No ‘Instances’ Where CIA Over-Classified Secrets”)

Also, the CIA “chose not to evaluate declassification actions” in this report but provided “no explanation for that decision.” In other words, it did not bother to inspect whether it is appropriately declassifying information that should not be kept secret.

All the recommendations in the inspector general report are censored. They all address how the CIA can better mark information that the agency classifies and for some unclear reason that is sensitive information that if released would help the terrorists win.

In a September 2013 report, the CIA’s inspector general could find “no instances” of over-classification. The report, obtained Wednesday by The Huffington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, was based on a sample of CIA intelligence reports.

The report was produced in response to a federal law meant to reduce over-classification. In January, the CIA refused to release the report to HuffPost until after it underwent a review process.

The Central Intelligence Agency has asked for authority to destroy email messages sent by non-senior officials of the Agency. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has tentatively approved the proposal.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Taking to the General Assembly podium today, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Joe Natuman said that as a Pacific small Island developing State (SIDS), his country was confronted with unique development challenges, which needed to be addressed by the UN and international community.

Noting that small island developing nations must speak with one voice at the global level, representatives of those countries today pressed for international economic partnerships and efforts to combat climate change, on the final day of the annual General Assembly debate in New York.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade for Barbados urged the international community to make provisions for countries which are both small island developing nations and highly-indebted middle income countries.

Harvest the Hope, a concert on the farm of Art and Helen Tanderup in Neligh, Nebraska, right on the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, was many things: a musical tour de force starring Neil Young and Willie Nelson; an anti-pipeline message to President Obama whose election graphic formed the O of “Hope” on the stage banner, the word itself Obama campaign terminology; an artistic call to activism designed by artists Richard Vollaire and John Quigley whose crop design “Heartland No KXL” was plowed by farmer Tanderup into his corn field as he followed Quigley’s direction, in an image spanning the size of 80 football fields; and “The day the idea of the Keystone Pipleline died” as pronounced by thousands of attendees who stood in rows like the corn and chanted in call and response with Quigley.

Four months after Sao Paulo’s state water utility Sabesp spent 80 million reais (26.3 million euros) to tap so-called dead reserves in its shrinking reservoirs, water supplies for South America’s biggest metropolis are even worse than they were before.

Brazil’s worst drought in eight decades has turned most of Cantareira, the four-lake complex that supplies half of greater Sao Paulo’s 20 million residents, into a dried-up bed of cracked earth. What’s left are sediment-filled pools in the centre — the dead reserves — that were previously untappable until Sabesp built 3 kilometres of pipes to drain the water.

The manoeuvre bought Sabesp some time by boosting drinking supplies by 182.5 billion litres to almost 27 per cent of Cantareira’s capacity. Sabesp, formally Cia. de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo, expected the water to last until reservoirs are refreshed by summer rains that typically run from October through March.

Finance

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatization have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re skeptical, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favors certain personality traits and penalizes others.

He claimed the government had tried to frame him because of his criticism of the FBI, CIA and IRS. During the two-month trial, he did a curbside interview on live network TV outside the courthouse each morning and then went inside to challenge U.S. District Judge Lesley Brooks Wells, who tried to dissuade Mr. Traficant from representing himself.

In Washington, he barreled through the House in rumpled sports coats and loud shirts. Traficant fashioned himself as a maverick populist, spending much of his career railing against foreign aid and various government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the CIA.

“Lying, thieving, stealing nincompoops” is how he once described the latter.

Evangelists aren’t the only ones who have long recognized the virtues of cross-lingual engagement. By the end of World War II, the U.S.-funded Voice of America radio network was producing more than 1,000 different programs for worldwide broadcast in over 40 languages. In the late 1950s, the CIA had thousands of copies of a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago printed, which it then surreptitiously distributed to Soviet citizens.

There was once a telling advertisement for Guinness that went: “I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.” This super-intelligent cautionary jingle was adopted as the touchstone for his case by Dr Kehinde Andrews in his Head to Head with one of Exhibit B’s actors, Stella Odunlami (New Review).

This past week, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government shut down a critical news site, censored an article written by a columnist and launched an investigation into another news portal.

When the College Board established new national standards for Advanced Placement U.S. History courses, conservative members of the school board in Jefferson County, Colorado, called for changes to their local curriculum to promote patriotism and the free enterprise system and discourage civil disorder. Hari Sreenivasan reports on the ensuing protests against censorship by students.

The Egyptian authorities on Wednesday confiscated all the copies of one of the country’s largest private newspapers in order to censor an article, just days after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed in an American television interview that there was “no limitation on freedom of expression in Egypt.”

It is estimated that Iranian authorities block access to more than 5 million webpages, including popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; in addition to porn sites, bank webpages, and any media considered hostile to Iran.

An ACLU Freedom of Information request reveals that the NSA considers Reagan’s “Executive Order 12333″ (previously) its “primary source” of spying authority — and so it conducts this surveillance without reporting to Congress on it.

However, many traditional investigative methods will still work.“Wiretaps would still work. You can also get call-details records,” he said. “That’s available from the phone companies and it’s not affected by this decision.”

The text somewhat contradicts the headline, as it goes on to describe how the Central Intelligence Agency has issued instructions to its case officers operating in Europe to stand down only on “unilateral operations” involving officials of foreign host nations, which presumably implies countries in the NATO alliance. What that means in plain English is that if one is an American spy assigned to the station in France, one’s “host country,” going after a French official to turn him into a recruited agent is currently not allowed. A “unilateral operation” is one in which the CIA controls and runs the agent clandestinely without anyone else being aware of the relationship.

There’s now talk of Congress getting involved and passing laws that would either outlaw such encryption, and Holder went as far as to suggest that there should be legally mandated backdoors installed in such devices so that law enforcement could take a peek if they deemed it necessary.

Privacy may seem like a relic, but as companies adopt end-to-end data encryption for security purposes, individuals will be able to reassert control over their personal information, according to Gus Hunt, former chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. That shift also may upend data-driven business models such as online advertising, he said.

[...]

Mr. Hunt predicts a “return to privacy by default.” Encryption on computer and smartphone chips will become ubiquitous, and users will be able to control their data through the use of fine-grained tagging that establishes what other people can and can’t access.

Civil Rights

Today’s Project Censored Show presents a speech given by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. After his retirement from the CIA, McGovern founded “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,” and has criticized US spy agencies for their lawbreaking, and subservience to the agendas of politicians. He spoke in Santa Rosa, California on September 24, 2014, at an event co-sponsored by Project Censored.

McGovern is a changed man. He started out in the Army, then he worked for the CIA from the Kennedy administration up through the first Bush presidency, preparing the president’s daily intel brief. He was a hell of a spy. McGovern began to see the evil of much of the government’s work, and has since become an outspoken critic of the intelligence world and an advocate for free speech. He speaks on behalf of people like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

When the Department of Homeland Security illegally seized notes from Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson in 2013, the Times and the reporter took the DHS to court. A settlement has now been reached that includes a review of training for the DHS’ Coast Guard criminal investigators.

Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter who faces possible jail time for refusing to reveal confidential sources, will receive Colby’s Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and give a formal address at 5:30 p.m. in Lorimer Chapel. The public is invited to the panel discussion and the convocation.

The New York Times journalist who’s receiving this year’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism has faced down the prospect of jail for refusing to reveal a CIA source of classified information.

The Justice Department is trying to force reporter James Risen to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Risen used an unidentified source for his reports about a botched CIA effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government

Ming Chun Tang in the alternative media CounterPunch says that the protests are against the neoliberal economic policies that are destroying the prospects of everyone but the one percent. In other words, the protests are akin to the American occupy movement.

I have been watching the Occupy Central Movement with some detachment (some are also calling it the Umbrella Movement, since protestors sport umbrellas against the tropical sun and afternoon showers). The rubber stamp, Ministry of Truth-Western mainstream media is kowtowing to the Washington-London-Paris consensus, declaring that Occupy Central is hungering for Western style “democracy”, that it is bigger than Hong Kong. It all sounds so predictably deja vu. Knowing that free-wheeling Hong Kong is gladly letting CIA front NGO National Endowment for Democracy operate on its soil, is all we need to know. The main “non” governmental organizations (NGOs) that do the CIA’s bidding around the world are…

We Fully Support A People’s Movement In Hong Kong. As we explain further details about ‘Occupy Central’, it is the intention of this article to help the students and Hong Kongese people who are fighting for the future of Hong Kong make informed decisions on who they join in coalitions with and choose for Chief Executive when they achieve True Universal Sufferage.

(This Chinese peninsula) became a colony of the British Empire after the First Opium War (1839–42). As a result of the negotiations and the 1984 agreement between China and Britain, Hong Kong was handed over to the People’s Republic of China and became its first Special Administrative Region on 1 July 1997, under the principle of “one country, two systems”. The educational system followed the British English model until 2009, and Hong Kong’s independent judiciary functions under the common law framework.[15][16] The constitutional document drafted by the Chinese side before the handover based on the terms enshrined in the Joint Declaration,[17] governs its political system, and stipulates that Hong Kong shall have a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign relations and military defense.[18][19] Although it has a multi-party system, a minority controls 30 out of 70 seats of its legislature. Hong Kong has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world but also the highest income inequality among advanced economies.[5][tag]

A number of progressive and left-leaning writers in the US have jumped on a report by Wikileaks that the neo-con dominated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and various other US-government linked organizations with a history of subversion and sowing discord abroad are operating in Hong Kong and on that basis are making the leap of “logic” that the democracy protests in Hong Kong must therefore be a creation of US policy-makers.

Charles Lewis’ book, 935 Lies, would make a fine introduction to reality for anyone who believes the U.S. government usually means well or corporations tend to tell the truth in the free market. And it would make an excellent introduction to the decline and fall of the corporate media. Even if these topics aren’t new to you, this book has something to add and retells the familiar quite well.

The familiar topics include the Gulf of Tonkin, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the civil rights movement, U.S. aggression and CIA overthrows, Pinochet, Iran-Contra, lying tobacco companies, and Edward R. Murrow. Lewis brings insight to these and other topics, and if he doesn’t document that things were better before the 1960s, he does establish that horrible things have been getting worse since, and are now much more poorly reported on.

Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers.

AN OIREACHTAS COMMITTEE visited Shannon Airport this week to look at concerns by human rights group Shannonwatch about its use by US military aircraft in contravention of Irish neutrality and its possible use by the CIA for illegal renditions.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the CIA for records on the agency’s spying on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network.

The complaint recounts events leading up to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accusing the CIA of secretly removing documents from the Intelligence Committee, searching its computers and trying to intimidate congressional investigators.

The Committee has been investigating the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The Public Policy robo-poll of 898 registered voters was commissioned by the Constitution Project, a highly-respected non-partisan group that has been active in calling attention to the lack of accountability for the torture of detainees during the last administration.

The poll found overwhelming public support for release of a long-completed report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report is said to disclose abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized, and to expose a pattern of deceit in the Bush administration’s descriptions of the program to Congress and the public.

But despite having been completed in December 2012, the report remains inaccessible to the public. Most recently, the White House and the CIA have proposed redactions that Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein said effectively undermine its key findings.

Make no mistake: Torture is not “enhanced interrogation,” but a war crime under the Geneva Conventions written at the direction of the U.S. since World War II when Japanese officials were executed for the offense.

The Senate intelligence committee hopes to release soon a redacted summary of its 6,300-page report on the CIA’s interrogational torture program. As we wait, the committee is wrangling with the CIA over redactions that the CIA is demanding. So it is an opportune moment to think about how the public might react to the report.

An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans thinks that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence should make public its comprehensive report on the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11, according to a new poll released today by The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.

On October 1, 2014, Human Rights First released the following letter, signed by over a dozen former military and intelligence officials, categorically condemning the U.S. torture regime – calling it illegal, ineffective and counterproductive. As the Senate Intelligence Committee gears up to release portions of its CIA torture report, the Government Accountability Project commends the efforts of these and other former military and intelligence officials, without whom the public would still be in the dark about the United States’ torture program. National security whistleblowers have a long and notable history of exposing the crimes and human rights abuses the United States has committed in the name of national security, including torture. By bringing these abuses to light, national security whistleblowers play a vital role in ensuring that the United States never commits these terrible acts again.

President Obama’s “war on terrorism,” spurred by the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), poses a potential threat to American civil liberties. Under mounting pressure to eliminate an increasing number of security threats, national security professionals may be tempted to overlook boundaries in the name of national security.

This last weekend the AARC Conference drew over 200 to the Bethesda Hyatt Regency on the 50 th anniversary of the Warren Report. Kennedy’s violent death in 1963 shocked Americans, undermining public trust.

The Council of the European Union decided on Monday to mandate EULEX to support the judicial proceedings relocated from Kosovo that arise from the investigation by the EU Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) into the allegations contained in prosecutor Dick Marty’s Council of Europe (CoE) report on the human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Albania in 1999.

Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager has had his home raided by police searching for the hacker Rawshark.

In a 10-hour search of his house, Hager said computers and papers were seized in what appeared to be an attempt to discover the identity of the person who provided information used in the Dirty Politics book.

A photo appearing to show a refugee being abused at a home for asylum seekers has caused outrage in Germany. The photo has been compared to those from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Police are now investigating six cases of abuse at three different centres.

German police are investigating reports that guards at three asylum centres in North Rhine-Westphalia have been abusing the refugees interned in the centres. Photos released showing the abuse have been compared to Abu-Ghraib, whilst a colleague has told German media that the group of guards were nicknamed “the SS”, The Local has reported.

Holder, for that reason, leaves the rule of law in something of a tattered state, and his successor is not likely to do much of a restoration work. This, suggests Ryan Cooper, may be as much a matter of personal flaw as systemic problem.[4] Truly, an altogether illustrative statement about the Obama administration.

Internet/Net Neutrality

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said Russia must increase its cybersecurity but pledged not to impose total control over the Internet, amid fears Moscow is mulling whether to limit access to the worldwide Web.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ruled out any move to restrict Internet access for Russians despite the surge in cyber attacks. The president’s comments allayed concerns that Putin might try to disconnect Russia from the global web in an emergency.

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What Else is New

The latest tactics of the patent microcosm are just about as distasteful as last month's (or last year's), with focus shifting to the courts and few broadly-misinterpreted patent cases (mainly Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix)

The fightback against Section 101 and the US Supreme Court (notably Alice) seems to concentrate on old and new buzzwords, such as "Software as a Medical Device" ("SaMD") or "Fourth Industrial Revolution" ("4IR"), which the EPO recently paid European media to spread and promote

Infomercials are still dominant among news about patents, in effect drowning out the signal (real journalism) and instead pushing agenda that is detached from reality, pertinent facts, objective assessment, public interest and so on

A discussion about the infamous abundance of patent cases in the Eastern District of Texas (TXED/EDTX) and what this will mean for businesses that have branches or any form of operations there (making them subjected to lawsuits in that district even after TC Heartland)

The patent microcosm is so eager to stop the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that it's supporting sham deals (or "scams") and exploits/distorts the voice of the new USPTO Director to come up with PTAB-hostile catchphrases

Judgmental patent maximalists are still respecting high courts only when it suits them; whenever the outcome is not desirable they're willing to attack the legitimacy of the courts and the competence of judges, even resorting to racist ad hominem attacks if necessary

With or without the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which is the wet dream of patent trolls and their legal representatives, the EPO's terrible policies have landed a lot of low-quality patents on the hands of patent trolls (many of which operate through city-states that exist for tax evasion -- a fiscal environment ripe for shells)

The money-obsessed, money-printing patent office, where the assembly line mentality has been adopted and patent-printing management is in charge, is devaluing or diluting the pool of European Patents, more so with restrictions (monetary barriers) to challenging bad patents

he media in Europe continues to be largely apathetic towards the EPO crisis, instead relaying a bunch of press releases and doctored figures from the EPO; only blogs that closely follow EPO scandals bothered mentioning the new petition

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) sees the number of filings up to an almost all-time high and efforts to undermine PTAB are failing pretty badly -- a trend which will be further cemented quite soon when the US Supreme Court (quite likely) backs the processes of PTAB

The EPO is trying very hard to silence not only the union but also staff representatives; it's evidently worried that the lies told by Team Battistelli will be refuted and morale be affected by reality

Suspicions that Iancu might destroy the integrity of the Office for the sake of the litigation ‘industry’ may be further reaffirmed by the approach towards patent maximalists from IAM, who also participated in the shaming of his predecessor, Michelle Lee, and promoted a disgraced judge (and friend of patent trolls) for her then-vacant role